Female ski jumpers lose battle to compete in Vancouver
Wendy Stueck, Globe and Mail
In the end, they couldn’t fly far enough.
A group of determined female ski jumpers that launched a landmark legal battle for the right to compete in the 2010 Olympic Games yesterday landed short, their dreams ended by the Supreme Court of Canada’s refusal to hear an appeal of lower-court rulings that dismissed their case. For the group, comprising young women who long for nothing more than to soar through the air from an Olympic-sanctioned ramp, the decision came as a bitter, if not unexpected, disappointment.
“It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s the end. It’s still settling in,” Meaghan Reid, a 16-year-old who is one of the plaintiffs in the case, said yesterday from her home in Calgary. “We’ve worked for so long and so hard that we’re not going to give up until we get into the Olympics. But legally, for 2010, we’re done.”